Ed Sheeran, Lighter and Wiser, Releases ‘x’

AUSTIN, Tex. — Seven hours before Ed Sheeran was scheduled to perform at a taping of the show “Austin City Limits” here this month, three young women were sitting on a red blanket on the sidewalk outside the studio, braving 97-degree heat in hope of getting a ticket. Usual pop idol stuff.

Inside the studio a few hours later, the unusual pop idol — a pint-size 23-year-old British folk singer with a mop of red hair and an unassuming mien — was exultant. “I’m a small again!” he piped up excitedly, slipping on one of the show’s T-shirts to wear during his performance.

The last year or so had been rough — on his waistline, his romantic life, his state of mind and more — and finally, a couple of weeks before the release of his second album, “x” (Atlantic), he’d recalibrated: “I went from an S to an M to an L, back to M, back to S.”

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Ed Sheeran at the Hammerstein Ballroom this month.CreditJesse Dittmar for The New York Times

On “x” (pronounced “multiply”), which comes out Monday, Mr. Sheeran more or less tells the story of the accompanying emotional path, taking in the almost three years since the release of his debut album, “+,” which very, very slowly made him a star, which in turn very, very slowly started to remake him from the inside out, until he reversed the tide.

Until now, Mr. Sheeran has been best known for “The A Team,” a melancholy dirge of a ballad that tells the story of a drug-addicted prostitute, sweetened mightily by Mr. Sheeran’s plaintive voice and his gift for effortless melody. The song was a slow burner, eventually reaching No. 16 on the Billboard Hot 100. It also helped land him a slot opening for Taylor Swift on her “Red” tour last year.

That put him squarely in the cross hairs of thousands of teenage girls, and helped make his skeletal modern folk an unlikely pop phenomenon; last year, he sold out three nights at Madison Square Garden. “I don’t look like your typical pop star,” he said during an afternoon break at his hotel. “I don’t sing songs like your typical pop star.”

Mr. Sheeran’s impressive new album deliberately builds on that success in only incremental aesthetic ways. The opening single is “Sing,” an up-tempo blue-eyed soul dance track produced by Pharrell Williams, a clean fit in the Timberlake-Thicke white-soul succession plan, without the burden of having to innovate the style. It gives Mr. Sheeran something he lacked last time around, and wasn’t shy about wanting this time — an obvious radio hit.

“I wanted to make something Justin Timberlake-y,” he said, adding that the song wasn’t originally intended for this album, added only at the urging of one of his mentors, Elton John.

Even in relating this point, Mr. Sheeran is nothing but unassuming, and singer-songwriter folk is almost definitionally modest: lone performer onstage, often with just a guitar. (He augments the setup with a loop station that he manipulates with his feet.) But even though he may well be the most prominent folk-minded singer in contemporary pop, he’s an open-eared experimenter at core, and saddled with none of the modesty, false or otherwise, that typically go with the folkie role. He began busking and playing small gigs as a teenager, encouraged by his father, who told him he could leave school behind as long as he was working hard toward something. “The thing I was running from was having a mapped-out life,” he said.

“The competitive thing came early on,” he recalled. “Being on a lineup of five singer-songwriters and being, like, ‘I want to kill all of you.’ ” He likened it to Kendrick Lamar’s fiery taking of names on “Control”: “Love for all of you, but I’m here to blow you away.”

He self-released a string of EPs, but his most significant early notice wasn’t for his straight-ahead folk but for a collaboration album with some of the leading lights in grime music, at the time the dominant sound of black Britain, a project that immediately set Mr. Sheeran apart.

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Ed Sheeran with Pharrell Williams in the video for Mr. Sheeran’s “Sing”.CreditAtlantic Records

Collaborating widely has since been part of his career, writing songs for One Direction among others, but he insists that his most edgeless side — the pure singer-songwriter side — is his most natural: “I’d say that’s where I’m most comfortable.”

That’s the case on “x,” which has other up-tempo songs in addition to “Sing” (already Mr. Sheeran’s biggest American hit), but it shines most brightly on Mr. Sheeran’s gentler numbers. “Tenerife Sea” is an unreserved love song, with Mr. Sheeran multitracking his vocals for a chilling, twee effect. On “Thinking Out Loud,” he draws a lovely picture of a love that doesn’t age. (“When my hands don’t play the strings the same way/I know you will still love me the same.”)

Mr. Sheeran is a gifted singer with a tender tone and a naturalistic way with storytelling, which made him an apt choice to tour with Ms. Swift. (The two also shared a bracing duet, “Everything Has Changed,” on her last album.)

But also like Ms. Swift, he prefers in conversation not to color inside the lines he draws in his music. On teenage brushes with the law: “Both times I didn’t do anything, I was just at the wrong place at the wrong time.” On drugs: “Experimentation has been a part of my life ever since I was quite young, but it wouldn’t be something that I’d want to promote.”

And he’d rather not attach names to the subjects of his songs. “The worst thing that could have happened out of this album has already happened — people assuming ‘Don’t’ is about someone.” That someone is the British singer Ellie Goulding, with whom he was spotted holding hands at last year’s MTV Video Music Awards.

Perhaps the most folk thing about Mr. Sheeran is his stubborn wish that people focus on the content of his music, not its context, something that’s worried him more as he has become a minor tabloid figure.

“Here’s a fact that’s interesting,” he said. “ ‘Sing’ is about a very, very well-known person. No one knows that, so no one’s being like, ‘Who’s it about?’ ”

“Take It Back,” one of a handful of new songs (it’s on the album’s deluxe edition) on which he raps — Mr. Sheeran’s most angsty songs tend to be the ones he raps on — is also likely to raise plenty of questions: “Went from sleeping at a subway station/To sleeping with a movie star/And adding to the population.” (Mr. Sheeran said he does not have a child.)

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Ed Sheeran at 14, busking in Galway, Ireland.CreditJohn Sheeran

“I did everything last year,” he said exhaustedly. “Everything. Everything wrong and everything right. It was a very important year.” At one point, he moved to Los Angeles for a relationship, only to be dumped the day he arrived: “I literally landed from Canada, it ended, then I went to the house and unpacked my stuff.”

He continued: “I was in a situation where something was presented to me that I never thought would ever be possible. I felt like I had to do it, I should not let this go, and I know now that things on the surface aren’t always what they are.”

The accumulated intensity of his experiences — touring with Ms. Swift, living out of a suitcase and writing songs between shows — came at a price: “I didn’t really like myself last year, the whole package, I wasn’t happy.”

But this year has been a time for restorative behavior. He’s been in a stable relationship, with a person out of the public eye. And after a seeing a photo shoot of himself this year in which he felt he looked too puffy, he gave up bread and beer, taking him back down to an S.

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Rapt fans of Mr. Sheeran at his June concert at the Hammerstein Ballroom. Last year, he sold out three shows at Madison Square Garden.CreditJesse Dittmar for The New York Times

His self-assurance is kicking back in, too: “I’d like to get to a point where you just reach a level and stay there — you know, how Springsteen never dropped from being Springsteen.” To that end, he spends a not insignificant amount of energy on the less glamorous side of the business. “I’m very excited about stats and figures,” he said. He is emailed chart and sales information every day. He knows how many people he played to on the Taylor Swift tour (1.6 million) and how many albums he sold as a result (20,000). When “Sing” was taking off in the United States, but not as quickly in Britain, he fretted.

Part of Mr. Sheeran’s long-term success plan is to spread himself around. He’s recently written music for the pop group Rixton, the moody soul singer Jessie Ware, the teen dance music star Martin Garrix and for a collaboration between the R&B star Usher and the D.J.-producer Skrillex. “I watch the charts every single day,” he said, “and it would be a lot more interesting if I have more of my own” songs on them.

In the van heading back to his hotel, he gleefully pulled out his phone and played a bit of a “Sing” remix done by Psy, the K-pop crossover star. In his room, he played several tracks he recorded with the rapper the Game, including one in which he coos, “She’s a freak show/Don’t you think she knows” over one of DJ Mustard’s signature minimalist beats.

At the “Austin City Limits” taping, he performs intensely for the crowd, which is far younger than the ones typical for the show, which tends toward genteel singer-songwriters and austere Americana acts of an older generation.

On “Give Me Love,” from his first album, he vibrates through the song, abusing his loop station and pushing his voice past its comfort zone. Near the end of “Don’t,” he throws in the chorus of Chris Brown’s “Loyal,” another caustic song about romantic disappointment.

He sang “All of the Stars,” a song from the soundtrack to the recent weeper “The Fault in Our Stars,” taming the eager crowd into a rapt silence. Up in the control room, a director was orchestrating the cameras as they swept over the underlit faces of the teenage faithful. “She’s crying,” he said, as the camera lingered on one sobbing dark-haired girl. “Beautiful.”

Correction:

Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this article misstated what day Ed Sheeran’s new album, “x,” will be released. It’s Monday, not Tuesday.